No mother. Let me be and lest me live

Ulysses is a book of free-floating association; it is characterized by a narrative style that suggests a ‘disinterested’ and solipsistic world in which each character is cloistered and detached from meaningful relationships with others, dispensing with all possibility of change and fulfillment. As in the failed relationship between Molly and Bloom and their inability to find a source of comfort and reconnection with each other after the death of their son Rudy, Joyce’s characters inhabit a lonely and disaffected world that was presaged by Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism. Joyce’s characterization of detachment and disconnection in Ulysses suggests that the Dublin he left with such haste and disfavor years earlier found its way into his fiction through the inner narratives of his main characters.

Joyce’s Ulysses can be read as a comedic tragedy in which its main characters experience the monotonous pains of ordinary living, and through these tragedies try to discover some form of redemption in light of their suffering. This striving towards disinterestedness is a constant theme in Schopenhauer. The main protagonist in Ulysses, Bloom, in his travels through Dublin finds himself caught up in an endless stream-of-consciousness thought that revolves around the failures of his past and the dissatisfaction of the present.

What then does this suffering and tragedy have to do with creativity? In Joyce the constant striving for satisfaction is a theme that repeats itself through Ulysses. Bloom is constantly at odds with feelings for Molly and his need for sexual and existential fulfillment. The need for a way out of this dissatisfaction impels each character to search for a way out of unhappiness and tragedy. In Joyce this satisfaction eludes its primary characters, they continue to exist in a world of unhappiness and tragedy. The grief and guilt that haunt Stephen after the death of his mother:

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an adour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, and a faint odour of wetted ashes. Her gazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat. Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No mother. Let me be and lest me live. (Joyce, 1992, pp.10-11)

Stephen is less concerned with his mother’s death, than with his inability to free himself from the guilt and shame he feels for not being a good son. Joyce’s characters inhabit an ‘inner world’ of cold ‘disinterest’ where their thoughts are alone and uncommunicative to anyone except themselves. In the end Joyce’s characters remain trapped, captive to their own inner pessimism. This encourages disinterestedness from disinterest, twice removed from the disinterested. In this way Stephen is looking at himself looking at himself, twice-removed from the object of disinterest. Even a cold dispassionate disinterest would be too much to bear.